Genealogy, critique and the government of public servants
Edward Barratt, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
This paper aims to demonstrate one possible contribution of genealogical critique to the political challenge of reinventing contemporary public administration in Britain. Developing a particular approach to genealogical criticism suggested in part by a critical reading of the Foucauldian genre of governmentality studies, criticism in this instance has the aim of unsettling the advanced liberal orthodoxies which presently inform the government of public servants. Genealogical criticism points towards a number of different styles or strategies of historical criticism. One such strategy follows an essentially comparative logic: by the study of historically distant regimes of truth and the contingencies and struggles out of which they were formed, genealogy seeks to convey that that which we know has not always been the case opening up the possibility of reinvention in the present. Sometimes, as in Foucault’s later work on antiquity, the aim is to show that historically distant practices, with some work and modification, may be of benefit to contemporary struggles. It is essentially this same comparative logic which will be followed here. Returning to a moment of inventiveness in the organization of public offices in Britain in the middle and later years of the nineteenth century - ‘reforms from within’ during the 1850’s as well as critiques from the left that began to emerge during the 1880’s – the paper ultimately asks what we might take and re-work from a particular historical episode, from a particular and often forgotten rationality that began to emerge at this time and the manner of its criticism by the emerging forces of the left.